Design and Field Experimentation of a Cooperative ITS Architecture Based on Distributed RSUs

This paper describes a new cooperative Intelligent Transportation System architecture that aims to enable collaborative sensing services. The main goal of this architecture is to improve transportation efficiency and performance. The system, which has been proven within the participation in the ICSI (Intelligent Cooperative Sensing for Improved traffic efficiency) European project, encompasses the entire process of capture and management of available road data. For this purpose, it applies a combination of cooperative services and methods for data sensing, acquisition, processing and communication amongst road users, vehicles, infrastructures and related stakeholders. Additionally, the advantages of using the proposed system are exposed. The most important of these advantages is the use of a distributed architecture, moving the system intelligence from the control centre to the peripheral devices. The global architecture of the system is presented, as well as the software design and the interaction between its main components. Finally, functional and operational results observed through the experimentation are described. This experimentation has been carried out in two real scenarios, in Lisbon (Portugal) and Pisa (Italy).